The art of storytelling

I've always been poor with languages. Unlike so many of you who are able to dissect the world into neat multi-syllable words that you ate for lunch in that tiny foreign restaurant just around the corner I struggle with my daily bread. It's often coarse and hurts your delicate palate yet my mother cannot teach me more sophisticated ways of cooking anymore.
I mixed jaggery with bananas for lunch today.
It was sweet and had a smell of a village house. We ate it together - you and I and then the story came to sit down by our side. We gave her a cup of tea. She was feminine for sure - the story I mean, the tea was more masculine in nature - black with lemon and just a single spoon of sugar in it.
She was distressed she said. I asked her why, but she remained silent for a long time.
A man was passing by. He was carrying his proposal for a government grant for a revolutionary project about the art of storytelling. We offered him tea, yet he refused. He was too busy comparing grant opportunities offered by some far away countries and the discussion had to turn towards the semantics of proposal writing. The story was silent. I think she turned her head away.
A lizard climbed inside a paper lampshade. I could see each part of her body being lit. Black mark of ink on red paper.
The project was intense. It was based on the concept of taking the words out from random pages of a dictionary and applying them to white sheets of paper. The task was so deep that the participants began to worry if they manage to stay with it for the whole day.
A tiny fish touched my foot as I stood in the blue waters. I giggled in response. The butterfly flapped its blue and black wings. I watched it hiding in the grass.
The project was a success. New methodologies of the art of story writing were invented and all the participants discussed the lack of such way of communication in our culture. Apparently we sold everything to cater for the foreign tastes. Disturbing... don't you think?
The dogs barked. I patted one of them. He licked my hand.
The man got up. He was in hurry to finish his project before the dead line. It was important. The future of mankind could be depending on it.

She opened her mouth but could not say any word. They got stuck somewhere near the larynx. She coughed. And coughed. And coughed. And... and each time her torso was torn by the spasm her body would shrink a bit. She was becoming smaller and smaller until she became an almost invisible point hidden between the dust of the earth.

The cup of tea stayed on the table.

And you and I engrossed in our thoughts about the art of story telling...

in brackets

The stones were heavy. They made her feel exhausted that night. It wasn't even a bad dream.
What surprised her though was the clarity of newly found straight lines. They indicated the directions. Short sentences. Sharp thoughts. Precise steps. Following procedures. She felt as if life had evaporated from her chest in that 30 minutes conversation at night. Her left shoulder was turning into a stone and she was amazed to see the strength in the rest of her body that prevented her from collapsing and crushing against the floor.
She felt as if something precious died in her that night.
She was sitting alone.
She wanted to cry.
She did for a moment.

She felt jealous of all those who could play in the open fields.
The bonded labourer. Just a few more stones in the basket above her head.
They felt so heavy that she had even forgotten to dream about the blue ball that a spoilt child threw out of a shiny red car many nights back.

Just a few words written in brackets in between the rambling stories that one will never really read.

The fear of falling

The invitation came suddenly. Just a few words scribbled on a piece of paper that he must have torn out of a morning newspaper. He must have been sitting motionless for a moment, engrossed in lackadaisical thoughts mixed with the smell of the world news, and then a sudden glow of the raising sun reflected in his eyes giving him an extra dose of energy that enabled him to stand on the stage one more time that day. He laughed to himself and picked up a pen to write those few letters that she got to hear the next day.
He felt angry inside. Each day made him loath more and more that part of himself that made him wear a polite smile on his face as he stood in front of the audience as everything else in him wanted to scream and walk away. He despised himself for this. The lack of courage and hypocrisy that he did not want to admit even to himself. He lacked courage in many other instances too, yet this one bothered him most.
He did not have courage today either so he crumpled the note he was writing and threw it towards the window.
He got used to it. The absence of courage mingled with the presence of fears. These two states accompanied him throughout his life, only the proportions varied.
His childhood was marked by the absence of those who should have been present. His father embarked on a journey to the lands more beautiful than the simple drawings that his mother had decorated the walls with. He returned years later proclaiming that after seeing the world he decided it's time for his family to look after him once again. Nobody objected, only a child hid in the corner of the heart of a man looking outside the window.
It was beautiful out there. He loved watching birds and flowers and his eyes would often wander in that direction when people around him were busy teaching him the rules of the market economy. He failed his exams in marketing many years later, which sometimes left him scared of those around him who managed to exchange schooldays bicycle for shining fast moving cars. He began to look towards the window even more often - out there nobody asked for his marketing results.
The world outside the window called him to join in its eternal movement. The soaring of an eagle, the branches shivering in the wind, the gentle precision of a bud turning into a flower, the everchanging shapes of the clouds as they surfed through the sky. He could feel each of their movements tying invisible strings to his limbs as his body stretched, spiralled and dove through space. He enjoyed this sensation of being one with all those being outside the window. It made him feel as if he was a bird. He would sometimes even toss invisible wings in his dreams...
She came to him suddenly. He had not seen any such creature before... her limbs so fair, hair that resembled a field of sunflowers on a summer's day, her movements so fluid that he could swear she was walking in the clouds and not on earth. She touched him and he entwined himself around her like a creeper. He felt he found that place for himself that would link all the scattered worlds he belonged to. She smiled at him and allowed him to develop wings that would carry her high in the sky, until one day her eyes fell on a man driving a red shining car. Before he even noticed the stem of his plant had nothing to support himself on.
He fell and the fall was so strong that his wings broke in many places. He suddenly understood the scar in his mother's heart that grew to become a canyon the day his father had left. The fall disoriented him and so he began to run away from himself not knowing where was he running to... The day he stopped he tried to look back, but he could not see himself anymore. The only thing that his eyes could perceive were the broken bones on his back and a report card that proclaimed him to have failed in business marketing.
He would sometimes let himself being touched by various bodies that came near him. Strong musculature of men and curvy lines of women. He wanted to forget himself at night yet it hurt again in the morning. Not knowing what to do he began building the wall around. It felt safe in that space that would demarcate the boundary between him and them and he still had an open sky above to look at.
He woke up screaming one night - he found himself floating on a melting iceberg and there was nothing but water all around. He did not know how to swim.

She had a strange dream that night - she was walking on a desert and the hot sun was burning her feet. It made her cry. She felt invisible that night. It wasn't only nights that made her feel invisible, the days made her feel like that too. 

He watched her from a distance. She was playing with a child and seeing this made his eyes shine. It filled him with a sudden warmth. It irritated him. It reminded him of all those things that 'might have been...' but were not there. It was a strange mixture of feelings - tenderness, anger, irritation, regret and fear. Fear of falling that prevented him from ever trying to fly again.

She felt sudden warmth as his eyes fell on her. It felt as if the broken bone of her left wing was healing and if he was giving contours to her otherwise invisible body. She did not move though. She was scared of falling.

They did not know I was watching, but I did.

The crumpled piece of paper raised itself from the floor and flew outside the window. It had the wings of a butterfly and it made me smile when it sat in my hair the other day. The Comma... It whispered "Hi, how have you been? I've been missing you. Will you tell me a story?"

The Comma

The tea was getting cold. She was watching the vapour taking away the sharp lines of his face and turning them into shapeless memory.
It was confusing for her and she wanted to shout at him and beat him on his arm till he begins to laugh, sit next to him with her head on his shoulder and shamelessly hold his hand in hers, walk away...  as abruptly as a midway finished sentence. All three at the same time like a photo taken on an old zenith camera when the film got stuck on a single frame.

They were looking at the trees and he spoke of his fascination for the reddish flowers while she closed her eyes and caressed the palm tree leaf, or was it the leaf itself that intended to gently play with her palm?

Not-so-far away someone was constructing a to-be-famous installation of the trees. Plastic was gathered for that purpose and TV cameras were to transmit the opening event to the places very-far-away. She could not help but pray for a miracle that would dash that plastic world far-away-from-hers.

She felt tired. The tea was cold. She decided to put a comma at the end of the sentence, it was not the time for full stops yet, they seemed too fat for this season,

The Comma spread its scalloped wings and flew away,

I sat at the threshold and felt the touch of its wings on my face, or was it just the wind that absorbed the vapour of the tea before it became cold,,, The question hanged on the wall as I looked back, and then suddenly it fell down and splashed cold water on my face. A full stop. The Comma sat in my hair...

The one that stitches scattered pieces together.

She always envied him his precision while juggling with words. His ability to sum up all the thoughts in just a few letters. Like a sharp tip of a pin.
Her words always seemed to be running on the curved paths of her perception and she could swear that sometimes she was even able to hear their laughter inside her head. The words would mock her in various ways - sometimes they would refuse to fly out of her mouth and she would stand there among the people feeling smaller to any of them. At other times they would pair themselves inside her mind in some strangely shaped clusters that she wasn't able to comprehend or they would hide themselves inside a box and push some unwanted word out for her to ponder upon.

She sighed. It took her 600 seconds to be able to come up with the last few sentences. She also had to open a dictionary 5 times.

She sat quietly on the threshold. The caterpillar made a bed for itself inside a leaf, however, this time she was sure that it was just a pest. A grasshopper sat on her hand few nights back, a man sitting next to her told her that it must be a sign of good luck. She smiled. It made her feel warm, yet at the same time she knew that he was not the one she wanted to curl next to on a cold winter night.

She sat on the floor by the wall and quietly observed his fingers moving on the piano keys. They both looked similar to her- the keys that lost its sparkling white colour and the roughness of his hands. He loved a woman once, she knew that. He would play the piano for her and watch her as she would dance for him in the room. He would then stand up and join her in the dance. He would hide his face in her hair and kiss her neck. His fingers would gently play with the white skin of her breasts. She flew outside the room one day, just like the vapour drifting above a blue and red cup of hot tea. He turned himself into a magician then, yet sometimes the smell of strawberries is stronger than that of magic runes, so he hid his belief in magic inside a box and turned himself into a jester instead. He still played the piano, yet the courage to dance had left him years back.

She sat on the floor by the wall and quietly observed his fingers moving on the piano keys. She felt drawn to that rough skin, newly acquired strands of grey hair. She loved the music that he played and often wished of becoming a book that he would read before sleep. Maybe then he could put pins and nails into the walls in the living room and hang some paintings with not-so-straight lines there.
She did not feel lost this time, she did not need to cry in the rain, she did not need to bang at the doors and to shout to him to pull her out of that invisible mist that she had become. She grew up a bit. And she did not need him to dance, she needed him to read.

And as he read he took off his shirt and she could see his faceless body. She came closer and as she touched him they both dissolved into one drop of red and blue. The red ball that a spoilt rich child threw out of the window of a moving car and the blue ball that another child saw in her dream as she lay her head on a pillow made out of her mother's sari.

I took a sip of tea. My fingers were tired of dancing on the black and white keys of the piano. As I turned I saw a girl sitting at the threshold. She was smiling. She stood up and began to dance... 

Us and them

Homo homini lupus est.
attack - retaliation,
retaliation - attack,
front page in big fat font in the morning newspaper,
Syria, Paris, Lebanon, Dadri...
(a child just died in Africa, yet the lack of oil in the region makes this death less honoured)
them - us,
us - them...
black and white colours of right and wrong - the former one always stand on the side of us.

Will there be a day when us and them could turn into 'we'?

It takes 5 minutes to fall 9000 meters down before you hit silence.

Did they? or Did they not?
.
.
.
.
The facts and speculations  are being thrown at us each day.
.
.
.
.
Did they? or Did they not?



5 minutes.

Did someone smoke a cigarette?
Did a child hold his mother?
Did she scream?
Did they not regret having gone there?
Did the wine spill over her white dress?
Did he try to open emergency exit and jump?
Did she think it is just a bad dream?
Did he feel hungry?
Did he regret not having called her last night?
Did she cry?
Did he hold the hand of that stranger sitting next to him?
Did he pray?
Did she close her eyes?

Did they? or Did they not?

5 minutes.


It takes 5 minutes to fall 9000 meters down before you hit silence.

An average verse.

The quality of averageness entangled me today
It pushed me to a bottle, like a djinn.
I painted the glass with vibrant colours to hide its content, yet
the bottle proved to be too small for the greateness of my averagness,
it spilled outside the brim:
average intelligence that fails to deconstruct itself in the light of Derrida's theory,
average face that has never been immortalised on the canvas at NGMA,
(even ambition is average as it fails to strive for the walls of Louvre)
average muscular strength that makes me stay on the floor longer than those not-so-average bodies around,
average poem, no average comment on that shall be offered.
Average, average, average to the point of nausea.
only the spelling mistakes and mispronounced words shall proudly announce my individuality,

I

The 'I' in me wears a thick coat on a hot summer's day.
It closes the eyes in the middle of things:
intro-I-duction, po-I-em, walk-I-ing.
It stops with the eyes closed and hands extended
feeling the structure of the wall near by.
It will be late for work today,
although,
the sense of responsibility
will push it towards the doors.
I inter-I-rupted poem.
It will come back to it in the evening.

I sat to it with a cup of tea in my hands,
while the 'I' in me kept pondering over the sense of it all.
I watched the child, the adult and the I conspire against me.
The child was laughing
The I was missing
The adult was annoyed.
I sat in the corner looking at the I.

We were trying to measure each other.
I wore a thick coat and I went away.

The Cow.

'She's a fat cow...' These were the exact words that would creep into his mind each night as he mounted her on the squeaky cot standing in the corner of the room.
'You stupid cow...' he would tell her as he slapped her for having gone out with her girlfriends to buy the glass bangles without telling him.
He milked her parents well on their wedding day - new motorbike and a smartphone with unlimited access to those pretty scantly clad kittens that would make up to him for having to bear with that cow of his.

He heard in the evening that a man kept cow's meat in his fridge. He was outraged. How could one have even thought of eating a cow. He run to the man's house with a stone in his hand.

I run out of words. They turned into sharp  blades of grass that the cows graze on...